


on paper planes

by WatanabeMaya



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Abandonment, Angst with a Happy Ending, Awkward Conversations, Boys In Love, Canon Compliant, Confrontations, Denial of Feelings, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Even More Heated Grocery Store Confrontations, Fix-It of Sorts, Getting Together, Ghosting AU, Grocery Store Revelations, Insecurity, Long-Distance Relationship, Love Confessions, M/M, Making Up, Misunderstandings, Nobody is Dead, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Reunions, Running Away, Summer Romance, does not actually involve ghosts, omg guys nobody dies ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:22:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25201621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WatanabeMaya/pseuds/WatanabeMaya
Summary: It's summer, the season of fireflies, and Tsukishima Kei finally comes to terms with what it means to be in love.
Relationships: Background, Kuroo Tetsurou/Tsukishima Kei, Tsukishima Kei & Yamaguchi Tadashi, Yachi Hitoka/OC, Yachi Hitoka/Yamaguchi Tadashi, onesided - Relationship
Comments: 15
Kudos: 113





	on paper planes

**Author's Note:**

> pls enjoy another work of me unhealthily projecting my anxieties onto my faves haha
> 
> disclaimer: i dont own hq

“Go on,” Yamaguchi tells him, coaxing. His eyes are gentle. His tone, imploring.

Beyond his better judgment, Kei lets out a sigh. Kei gathers his bearings and steps inside the cafe, the clatter of the doorway and faint chime of the entrance bell enough of a signal to mark his arrival. 

“Welcome to  _ Sarutahiko. _ How may I help—“ a deep voice calls out to him. His eyes meet the barista’s.

“—you?” Kuroo manages to finish the greeting just barely.

“Nope,” Kei mutters mostly to himself flatly, popping the  _ p, _ before swallowing down bile and once again stepping outside.

Then, he runs.

Kei races down the sidewalk, only faintly catching the sound of Yamaguchi’s voice and frantic hollering, a high tenor calling out  _ Tsukki! _ and repeated rephrasings asking him what’s wrong. He doesn’t get to answer.

Kei keeps on running, lets his feet carry him even as he stumbles over that awkward crack on the sidewalk, wills all the power in his legs to take him as far away as they can. 

He doesn’t look back.

➢

Tsukishima Kei is fifteen when he first receives his first kiss, pressed against the wall of a deserted locker room at the back of the third gym. Kuroo’s lips are soft against his, wet warm and heady and keeping him on his toes. Kei sticks his tongue in and thinks of how hot Shinzen is in the summer, the way his skin turns sticky from the humid Tokyo heat. Kuroo pulls him in close. It feels dizzying, almost addictive.

Kei is the one who pulls away first, sparing a minute to catch his breath. Kuroo rests his head against the other’s shoulder, dips his face into the crook of Kei’s neck.

“See you around, Tsukki,” Kuroo whispers as he smiles against Kei’s skin. Kei mumbles back his reply, watches the sight of the other’s broad back as his figure walks off into the distance. Kei brings a hand up and brushes it against his lips. __

“See you,” he promises.

The taste of him is sweeter than he remembers.

➢

“Long time no see,” a voice calls out to him from behind. Kei whips his head around and is greeted by a familiar nest of rooster-like black hair; a warm pair of golden eyes. The other’s hand hovers above his shoulder, just mere inches away from letting it rest.

He lets out a breath. “Kuroo-san.”

“Care to explain why you’re avoiding me?” Kuroo grins, the question slipping out his mouth breezily. “Is my hair really that hideous that you felt the need to run away as soon as you saw it?” 

“I wasn’t avoiding you,” Kei frowns in reply, lip jutting out in his signature moue. “I just–”

“You just...?”

“Forgot something,” he finishes lamely. “My...my wallet. At home. I...uh, have to rush back to get it.”

“Right.” Kuroo nods sagely, running his thumb over his chin as he feigns falling in pensive thought. “I totally believe you,” he says, like a liar. His eyes tell Kei that he doesn’t.

“Shouldn’t you be working?”

“I asked Yakkun to hold down the fort for now.”

“Then you should probably go back soon.”

“It’s fine,” Kuroo waves his hand airily in a vague show of dismissal. “It’s good to see you’re doing well.” 

“I’m visiting my brother,” Kei blurts out suddenly, unprompted, without Kuroo having ever asked. Kei curses himself as he watches Kuroo raise his brow at his abrupt declaration.But Kei rambles on like a fool, laying bare his stupid and treacherous heart, and allows himself to keep going. “I’m here for the weekend. We’re scouting around for dorms. I’ve been looking into potential colleges. I’ll move in once I graduate in the spring.”

“Oh?” Kuroo graces him back in response, eloquent as ever. 

“Y-Yeah.” Kei nods, voice small. “I want to study here. In...in Tokyo.”

There’s something about his words that makes him sound desperate, Kei knows. Maybe it’s the fact that he has a tendency to overthink things. Or maybe, more likely, it’s the fact that he probably is.

Kuroo tilts his head to the side and stares at him briefly, amber eyes searching for something and softening with the warmth of his gaze. “Oh,” Kuroo says again, and Kei can hear the relief in his voice when he does. “That’s great, Tsukki. Guess I’ll be seeing you around then.”

“Yeah,” Kei promises, words soothing like a balm rubbed over the raw ache he’d long felt from their distance. “See you.”

➢

They are sixteen when Yachi first gets herself a boyfriend. Kei is sixteen when he watches Yamaguchi break down before his eyes.

Kei can’t bring himself to be angry with her. Just because his best friend is in love with their manager doesn’t mean that Yachi isn’t allowed to pursue a separate happiness all on her own. It’s nobody’s fault she couldn’t feel the same way.

It’s Wednesday when they stumble across the girl during the tail-end of their second period, when they’re switching classrooms to head towards the Biology lab on the west wing of the campus. Kei spots her first, sees the short blonde totter through the corridor with a stack of papers bundled up in her arms. Yamaguchi walks alongside him and fails to even notice her pass, too busy talking about their Trigonometry quiz or their Algebra test or something of the other.

“Tsukishima-san!” she calls out to them cheerfully in greeting, “Yamaguchi-san! Hello!”

Kei nods to her in the affirmative. Yamaguchi nearly does a double-take at the sight.

“Yachi-san,” he squeaks, “Hi! Do you need help with that?”

A quick shake of her head. “ I’m okay,” she smiles. “Sensei just wanted me to deliver these printouts to the class.”

Yamaguchi abandons Kei instantly and hurries over to Yachi’s side. “They look heavy,” Yamaguchi remarks as he splits the load half-and-half, a little uneven in how he cuts up the stack and divides it partway. “At least let me help you lighten some of the load.”

“But, I couldn’t–”

“It’s fine, Yachi-san,” Yamaguchi offers, sidestepping to the left to maintain a respectable distance from the taken girl. “You can go on ahead, Tsukki,” Yamaguchi turns back to face him. “Please tell Sensei that I’m going to be a little late.”

Kei watches the way his best friend hides his feelings beneath his unrequited efforts of a sacrifice. Kei watches Yamaguchi smile once Yachi allows him to stay by her side, the way his hand wavers only slightly under the papers’ weight if only to ease the other’s burden. Kei watches them as they walk together to leave him, arms near but only just barely touching and he thinks _oh_ — this must be what love looks like.

“Sure,” Kei answers back softly, voice lost in the chatter and the harried bustle of activity. Yamaguchi waves him off as Kei watches their figures go, eyes deep in thought as he stands alone in the middle of the hallway. 

Perhaps he wasn’t meant for that kind of thing at all.

➢

“Why didn’t you tell me he was working there?” Kei hisses into the receiver as soon as Yamaguchi picks up the call. He hears the other laugh and Kei decides he won’t grant his childhood best friend the benefit of a response until after the latter sobers from his fit. How dare Yamaguchi derive pleasure from his misery? The fucking traitor.

“Why didn’t you tell me you still haven’t gotten over your crush on Nekoma’s captain since first year, hmm?” Yamaguchi throws him another question from the other end of the line, voice smug albeit still wheezing. “In my defense, I thought you did. I mean I don’t remember you two keeping in touch after summer, and you never talked about him even once since the time we left training camp.”

“I–”

“Tsukki.”

“What?”

“You’re making that face again.”

“How would you know?” Kei scoffs, and scowls even harder at his phone. “You can’t even see me.”

“I don’t need to see you. I  _ know _ you.”

“Shut up, Yamaguchi.”

“I’m not even sorry this time, Tsukki,” another ringing laugh. Kei rolls his eyes. “So,” Yamaguchi begins, and his voice grows hushed as though imparting a secret, “how do you feel now, after seeing him again?”

“Fine. A little bit surprised? Also, annoyed. Normal.”

Yamaguchi hums. Then, a thoughtful pause. “Did Kuroo-san say anything to you?”

“Not really. He just wanted to know how I was doing and said he was glad to see I was well.”

“And did you say anything to him?”

“More or less the same,” Kei shrugs, then remembers Yamaguchi can’t exactly see him make the gesture – uncanny best friend psychic abilities aside. “Just. You know,” he clears his throat, “the formalities.”

“Uh-huh,” his friend’s voice intones boredly. “The formalities. And did you really think that was enough?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Tsukki, it doesn’t suit you. You should tell Kuroo-san how you feel. You still like him, don’t you? Well, congratulations, it’s mutual. I’m sure he also feels the same way.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“Oh? So what I saw back at the cafe of him chasing after you when you ran away was entirely meaningless?”

“Yes,” Kei snaps, then chews on his bottom lip. Yamaguchi stays silent as though waiting for him to say another word on the line. He gives him a minute to let his feelings pass. At last, Kei settles for, “Maybe.”

Yamaguchi laughs again, but it’s less of a cackle and almost like a comfort this time. The sound of it is warmer. Gentler, even. Through the rippling echo of the static, Kei hears himself let out a small sigh.

“Give yourself some credit, Tsukki,” his best friend’s voice carries quietly over the phone. “You’re not that hard to love, you know.”

➢

Kei learns, through the lens of an outsider, that to love someone else means to risk losing yourself in the process. 

Kei is twelve when his father leaves them for another woman, when his mother tosses him the file of their divorce papers and the photo evidence leaking his affair. There are pinpricks in her eyes from tears she doesn’t allow herself to let fall and his father doesn’t even bother to look up from his phone when she speaks. 

“You got rid of me once already,” he hears his mother say as he hides himself behind the wooden frame of the kitchen door, voice desolate and brittle like she’s fighting a losing battle. “Wasn’t that enough?”

This is how his mother has always been, Kei knows. Kei first learns of love through the years he’d been raised under her relentless patience, her kindness. How easily she allows herself to forgive. His mother loves in ways Kei thinks his father is undeserving – slow to anger, but even slower, still, to burn. 

His father leaves her without another word.

Kei watches his mother watch him go, listens to the soft click of the door and the softer croak of her sobs. Hears her whisper her sorrows into the cold space of an empty room, voice soft in the silence.

_ Why?  _ he remembers her asking, her question stark against the fading embers of his memory:  _ Why wasn’t I enough? _

Kei remembers being twelve when he first cried himself to sleep, asking a god he wasn’t sure he believed in why bad things always had to happen to good people.

➢

Kuroo is the one who finds Kei first. He finds him at the bread aisle of the corner store grocery, weighing out the merits and demerits of a raisin loaf versus a whole wheat versus something else he now barely even remembers, because contrary to popular belief, the stars are on his side. 

“I didn’t know I would find you here,” Kuroo’s voice says when he walks into him, pushing his basket cart towards the direction of Kei’s aisle.

“And I didn’t know I would find you working in that cafe.” Kei doesn’t bother to look up at him when he speaks. 

“It’s not like it was a secret.”

Kei shrugs back at him dismissively. “You never told me.”

“You never asked,” Kuroo answers him with a frown. “I would’ve told you if you did.”

“Hm,” Kei hums. Kuroo steps aside to make way for Kei once he’d settled for the raisin loaf. Kei heads to his basket and tosses the bread in together with the rest of his grocery pile. He reaches for the jam.

“Is your number still the same?” 

He nods. “Yeah.”

“Oh.” Kuroo’s voice goes small. “So all this time–”

“I didn’t know what to say.”

“Oh,” Kuroo says again. The syllable sounds even softer this time than it did last.

“Yeah,” Kei answers him in reply, because he doesn't know how else to awkwardly fill in the interval.  _ Sorry,  _ he thinks, probably, because his pathetic heart burns with a desire to continue with their more pathetic excuse of a conversation. The tip of his tongue is laced with the beginnings of an apology, but for what? Kei isn’t sure what exactly it would be for. 

“Are you mad at me?” Kuroo asks him right then and there, and Kei feels the familiar sensation of words being lodged at the back of his throat. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” Kei says, mumbling it more like, and coughs once to clear his throat when he speaks. “How could I be mad at you?” 

Kuroo’s frown deepens. “I don’t know. It’s just...all this time I’ve been waiting for you, Tsukki,” he says. “A call. A text. Maybe even a simple goddamn emoji would be nice. But it just never came, ya know?” Kuroo sighs, and suddenly Kei feels his eyes sting at the look of disappointment on the other boy’s face – a fleeting moment of forlorn honesty. “I thought you liked me.”

“I did,” Kei confesses and Kuroo blinks back up at him in surprise.  _ I still do,  _ Kei thinks but doesn’t let himself say the words out loud. 

But this is Kuroo he’s talking to. Kuroo with the cigarette smoke and wind-up box heart. Kuroo with the beady slant eyes and lopsided grin, a cheshire cat smile that never lets you know what really is on his mind. Kuroo, the lanky teenage boy with the paper plane soul, folded up neatly and tossed straight into the skies, a one-way ticket journey jetsetting to nowhere in an attempt to escape his very own self.

Kuroo, the boy who asks him, simply: “Why didn’t you say so?” 

Kuroo looks tired. Exhausted. Kei imagines the years they’d spent missing each other across the distance. How long has it been since that summer they spent hidden behind Shinzen’s third gymnasium, bodies pressed together beneath the shade of the fire trees? How many days has Kei let pass without bothering to send Kuroo back a single response? Nights that Kuroo has spent awake, patiently waiting for Kei to deliver him a message like a beacon of hope, a signal of a feeling?

He does not know how much Kei loves him. 

“Well?" Kuroo snaps, patience waning and thin. The store’s fluorescent lights reflect off the watery shine in his eyes, his voice brittle in a way that tells Kei he’s been irreparably hurt. "Look, I'm sorry I took up your time, but I'm even more sorry that I wasted mine. I just needed to know, Tsukki. What do you think, is this worth it? Were we worth it?" 

It very easily becomes a one-sided conversation. Kuroo speaks slow, deliberate – every syllable punctuated by the harsh blade of his emotions; every word that slips out of his mouth leaving Kei with scars more painful than his fists.

“Was I ever worth it?”

“Of course you were worth it,” Kei can’t help but find himself shouting back. It takes every ounce of self-restraint in him and the reminder he can’t afford to pay for another jar of blueberries out of the limited budget in his wallet to keep himself from throwing the glass onto the floor. “You always were.”

Kuroo looks back at him wordlessly with a sigh. He moves closer to take the jam away from Kei’s trembling hands, plucking it out of his grasp and gently placing the container safely on top of the steel-wood shelf. 

“Then I wish you told me,” Kuroo admits to him at last, quietly. 

Told you what? Kei can’t help but think. What they had was greater than what any of Kei’s relationships could have ever survived. Kei can hardly muster the courage within himself to attempt to paint a picture of it with his words, let alone imagine bringing himself to say:  _ I loved you so much I didn’t know how to tell you about it.  _

There are skeletons in his closet. Lies between his teeth. Kei gulps down his words before they can form, all caustic sentiments and the bitter taste of regret; the hollow feeling of single-handed remorse. Kei swallows down so hard he thinks he almost looks pained. 

“I don’t–” he mutters, struggling to take in air even though it feels like he’d just consumed bile. Kei pushes up his glasses as he digs his eyes into the heel of his palm. Another stuttered breath. “I didn’t know how.”

Kei forces himself to speak; to try again.

“Sorry,” he says, because it just feels like the right thing to do. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“Hey,” Kuroo calls out to him as he cries, hand gentle as he crouches down to press it warmly against Kei’s back. “Hey, Tsukki,” Kuroo calls again, hesitant, the tenor of his voice softening with unspoken understanding. Kei’s throat closes up at the sound. “Do you think we’re meant to last?”

It feels like a slap to his face.

“You think this is only going to end badly for us both, don’t you?” 

There’s the muffled sound of a hiccup. The unburdened echo of a sigh.

“I’m sorry,” Kuroo offers and that's just not fair, Kei thinks quietly to himself. Because everyone knows his sin is the one that weighs the most. It's always been his fault. “Were you scared? I should probably apologize. I didn’t realize you were feeling insecure. But you know, Tsukki, you shouldn’t be,” Kuroo whispers softly, the firm press of his fingers stroking soothing circles over the small of Kei’s back. “You’re more than what you think you are.”

Kuroo holds him with a kindness that reminds Kei of training camps in summer and high school tournaments in the spring; the tender brush of their first kiss. The greatest love he never had. Kei’s face crumples from the weight of his memories; lets the tears fall as he folds further into himself with a whimper.

“Tsukki–”

“Don’t call me that,” Kei lashes out at him, breaths stilted and tone sharp. There’s a medley of the voices – a regular customer, a part-time shopkeeper, a wandering child who’d just gotten lost and is now missing his mother, who knows, really – but Kei’s too busy to care about anything else but himself, hunched over in the middle of the grocery store bread aisle, fresh from a breakdown as his face is flushed with the heated stain of his tears. He hides his shame into the bent crevice of his arms. “I hate you.”

“No,” Kuroo murmurs as he answers back calmly, knowing, “No, you don’t.”

“You’re right,” Kei sniffs, petulant. His voice comes out muted against the stubborn press of his skin, but he refuses to lift his eyes to meet the other’s gaze.“I still love you.”

Kei feels Kuroo rest a hand on his head. Kuroo agrees, and his tone warms at the thought. “You do,” Kuroo whispers back at him, softly. 

“I hate that I love you.”

“Fair enough,” Kuroo says, lips curling on the edge of a smile, and Kei feels careful fingers running tenderly through his hair. 

➢

(“So, Tsukki–”

“I said don’t call me that.”)

➢

It’s summer, the season of fireflies, and Tsukishima Kei discovers what it really means when Kuroo learns how to say his name for the first time.

_ Kei,  _ he whispers, voice soft and sweet, nothing short of a miracle.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! have a great day xx
> 
> hype with me about haikyuu on [twitter](https://twitter.com/onigiri_maya)


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